The Inner Mirror

The Inner Mirror
[Vinod Anand]

I look again at a drawing my niece, then five, had made, and which I treasure. It has her, her sister, and another person who looks a lot like them. Under each ‘person’ is their name in a childish scrawl — Jacqui, Sue and God. “God looks like this, huh?” I asked; she laughed. “Of course, silly!” and went on to tell me she saw God often; didn’t everyone?

Why does ‘seeing God’ seem so unusual to us grown-ups? A Jewish Hassidic story is told about someone asking the great Rabbi Yisroel ben Eliezer, “Why does nobody seem to see God anymore?” He softly replied: “Because there is nobody left who can bow so low” Christian mystic poet Angelus Silesius wrote: “God, whose love and joy is present everywhere/ can’t come to visit you unless you aren’t there.”

The last surprising words are ‘aren’t there’, which makes a sense when you think it over. TR When we ‘are ‘there, so are all our concerns, projects, interests and occupations. It’s only when these are set aside that we open our eyes to seeing God. As always, we can turn to poets to learn more. Here is Mary Oliver: “...it is not hard to understand where God’s body is, it is everywhere and everything; shore and the vast fields of water, the accidental and the intended, over here and over there...”

One of Kabir’s poems begins with God asking, “Are you looking for me? / I am in the next seat/ my shoulder is against yours, and it ends with the lines “. . . tell me, what is God? / He is the breath inside the breath.” One of my favourite, if unlikely, teachers is Shug Avery, a character in Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple.

Shug wants Celie to understand that God does not have to be an old grey-bearded white man, but that he can manifest himself in other people. She teaches her that God can be seen in everything else. Celle then begins a letter: “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples.

Dear Everything. Dear God.” - We can learn to see God not only in beautiful things and acts. Lawrence Kushner, teaching on the powerful lessons in the Bible’s Book of Job writes, “At the end of Job, God says, in effect, I’m the whole thing...not just in sunshine and bluebirds, but even in the lions tearing gazelles, vultures eating carrion.

Everything. Everywhere. “God. God. God.” Or, as poet Dillet Freeman’s lines in his poem ‘Had We The Eyes’ ask: How can the rose! More than the clod! From which it grows! Embody God? It can be puzzling, and be deemed ‘wrong’ to some, that some traditions have, in the sanctuary of their shrines, a mirror.

People pay obeisance to their God standing in front of this mirror that reflects them; its placement symbolizing that God is inside oneself and it is of no use to seek God elsewhere. And with this realization, since everyone else reflects God too, we are enjoined to treat them too with love and respect.

Often we don’t realize or admit we see God because mainly we are afraid of what we — or others — might consider arrogance; or we feel guilty that we were taught and believe in One God, and this ‘seeing’ sounds like an aberration if not an outright sin! But when children tell us they see God, they are sharing with us, their capacity to see the presence or reflection of God in everyone and every aspect of Creation.

May we learn from them?